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All correlation measures, classical and quantum, must be monotonic under local operations. In this paper, we characterize monotonic formulas that are linear combinations of the von Neumann entropies associated with the quantum state of a physical system that has n parts. We show that these formulas form a polyhedral convex cone, which we call the monotonicity cone, and enumerate its facets. We illustrate its structure and prove that it is equivalent to the cone of monotonic formulas implied by strong subadditivity. We explicitly compute its extremal rays for n ≤ 5. We also consider the symmetric monotonicity cone, in which the formulas are required to be invariant under subsystem permutations. We describe this cone fully for all n. We also show that these results hold when states and operations are constrained to be classical. 

Abstract Communication networks have multiple users, each sending and receiving messages. A multiple access channel (MAC) models multiple senders transmitting to a single receiver, such as the uplink from many mobile phones to a single base station. The optimal performance of a MAC is quantified by a capacity region of simultaneously achievable communication rates. We study the two-sender classical MAC, the simplest and best-understood network, and find a surprising richness in both a classical and quantum context. First, we find that quantum entanglement shared between senders can substantially boost the capacity of a classical MAC. Second, we find that optimal performance of a MAC with bounded-size inputs may require unbounded amounts of entanglement. Third, determining whether a perfect communication rate is achievable using finite-dimensional entanglement is undecidable. Finally, we show that evaluating the capacity region of a two-sender classical MAC is in fact NP-hard.